The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing NuPack, ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta, and WebMatrix Beta 2 - Scott Guthrie announces the release of new betas of ASP.NET MVC 3 and Web Matrix, along with a first public release of NuPack, an Open Source Package Manager for .NET which will provide (another) means of packaging open source libraries and make it easy for developers to add references to these projects.
  • Introducing NuPack Package Management for .NET - Another piece of the Web Stack - Scott Hanselman discusses NuPack in more detail looking at its command line and GUI based use, alogn with discussing a change in role for him at Microsoft where he will be working with the web technologies team to promote things link NuPack.
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta Released - Phil Haack announces the ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta release, highlighting the detailed release notes, and discussing what is included and what is not included in this beta release, along with outlining the details of the next steps for MVC3.
  • Microsoft announces WebMatrix Beta 2 - The Official Microsoft Web Platform Team Blog announces the release of the 2nd Beta of WebMatrix, the completely free development environment for building simplified web applications on the Microsoft Stack
  • Introducing NuPack Package Manager - Phil Haack also shares some information and thoughts on NuPack, discussing the type of problem it is designed to solve, along with talking about the guiding principles of the project.
• Mono 2.8 is out - Miguel de Icaza announces the release of Mono 2.8. This new release is a major update and contains C#4 support, the new Generational Garbage Collector, the inclusion of a number of new .NET Open Source licensed technologies from Microsoft, and much more.
• WoVS Quick Add Reference VS Extension helps you say goodbye to the Add Reference Dialog - Greg Duncan highlights a new Visual Studio 2010 Extension which provides a solution to the always slow Add References Dialog. WoVS Quick Add Reference brings ReSharper like Add Reference support where you type the type name and the IDE suggests where that type lives and offers the ability to reference the assmebly.
• Razor Syntax Highlighter for MVC 3 Beta - Ben from BuildStarted.com shares an updated ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta supporting extension for Visual Studio which adds syntax highlighting for the Razor View Engine

Information

• The Evolution of Package Management for .NET - Rob Reynolds talks about his involvement in the Nu / NuPack package management system, talking about his experiences of how the projects were created and managed, and why package management is important.
• Unicorns, Triple Rainbows, Package Management and Lasers - Bil Simser shares an overview of NuPack, along with links to related posts from other well know bloggers, download links, and his story of its creation.
• NuPack .NET package management open-source software released - developer Fusion - Chris Alexander reports of the release of NuPack, and includes details of discussions between Seb Lambla (of OpenRasta, and more recently OpenWrap fame) and Steve Balmer at a recent London event debating the Microsoft way of creating Open Source software.
• Unobtrusive Client Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3 &Unobtrusive Ajax in ASP.NET MVC 3 - Brad Wilson discusses two of the new features of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta release. Unobtrusive Client Validation brings a clean unobtrusive way of adding validation via data attributes with consumer code in jQuery, and Unobtrusive Ajax also revolves round data attributes to add ajax functioanlity to standard forms
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location, Part 1: Introduction - Brad has also updated his 10 part ASP.NET MVC 3 series to contain the correct information relating to the Beta release
• POCO Results for MVC Actions - Javier G. Lozano looks at extending ASP.NET MVC to allow your actions to return POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) and ahve them automatically serialized to JSON using the NewtonSoft JSON.NET Serializer.
• Experimental ASP.NET MVC Add-ins - Miike Hadlow explores the creation of a Plugin architecture for his ASP.NET MVC powered e-commerce shop, looking at using the Managed Extensibility Framework to provide this functionality.
• October PragPub Magazine is here! - The Pragmatic Bookshelf announces the October edition of PragPub Magazine, available in PDF, epub, Mobi and HTML formats this edition contains articles on HTML5, agile programming, and good code.
• Writing a Compiler in C#: Lexical Analysis - Sasha Goldshtein posts on the creation of a compiler implemented in C# for a simple programming language. In this post, setting the context of the language and exploring the lexical analysis involved in parsing code written in a programming language.
• NHibernate 3 and Autofac, can go together? (part 2) - Thang Chung continues this series of posts with a look at the AutoFac Inversion of Control Container, and looks at wiring it up to support NHibernate use,
• Announcing Bootstrap - a simple JS library for loading scripts - Scott Koon provides a simple bootstrapping function for the lazy inclusion of JavaScript libraries, only including them in the page when your custom JavaScript requires them.

Community

• First UK Online Tech Days is this Friday - three free tracks of Windows Azure Platform goodness - Eric Nelson highlights the UK TechDays Online events, beginning this Friday (8th October) and providing 3 tracks of Azure related content provided over LiveMeeting

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Many thanks for all the 700th edition support and feedback, your kind comments and retweets are the things that keep me producing The Morning Brew every day.

Software

• Windows Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack Released - Wes Yanaga highlights the release of the Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack, This tooling works along side Windows Server 2008 and 2008R2 and System Center Operations Manager and allows you to monitor Azure applications for availability and performance
• Windows Azure Platform Training Kit - September Update - Patrick highlights the latest update to the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. The September update brings all the content up to date with Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio version 1.2, adds a number of new hands on tutorials, and updates and extends a few existing tutorials.
• SisoDb - An early prototype - Daniel Wertheim shares an early edition of his new project, a Microsoft SQL Server backed NoSQL schema-less data store which uses JSON to provide the format for stored data. Full source is available for this Open Source Project.
• Kaliro App Explorer is a quick, simple and easy way to explore the resources, modules, etc in a .Net Assembly (Yes, like Reflector, but simpler…) - Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day - Greg Duncan highlights Kaliro App Explorer, a reflector like tool which provides a simplier experience for exploring the resources files and modules contained inside your assemblies.
• Prism v4 - Drop 9 Coming Wednesday Morning - Pete Brown gives a heads-up of a new updated release of the Prism Composite Application Framework V4. This new release brings a new license with the project moving to a Microsoft Patterns and Practices License, completes the code samples and quickstarts.
• A Real WPF 4.0 WebBrowser - Chris Cavanagh announces the latest release of his WPF Chromium WebBrowser whcih brings a native WPF based browser control to the table. This latest release has been updated for .NET 4 and Awesomium 1.6 RC1

Information

• What is Functional Programming? Part 5, Bindings - Christopher Bennage continues his series of posts on Functional Programming with a quick look at bindings using the let keyword, exploring the true meaning of the keyword and the power it provides.
• Introduction to Functional Languages - DotNet-TV.com shares a video from ON Microsoft which is a 15 minute discussion of functional languages with Luke Hoban, the Program Manager for F#.
• Rethinking user interface test automation - Gojko Adzic shares some thoughts based on Geoff Bache’s "Making GUI testing productive and Agile" presentation at Agile Testing Days 2010, discussing the brittleness of recorded tests, the use and abuse of assertions and some alternative approaches to UI testing.
• Five rules for writing effective UI tests - Jimmy Bogard shares his top 5 rules for writing good UI tests, derived from his years of experience of creating UI tests and for working with some other talented developers. These rules can be applied regardless of the technologies used, and provide good food for thought, well worth reading before you attempt your latest UI testing
• Extending ASP.NET MVC’s Validation - Mike Ormond shares this week’s MSDN Flash featured article from David Bending addressing the extensibility of ASP.NET MVC validation, showing how you can extend the platform to provide hooks for implementing custom complex validations.
• RavenDB - Image Gallery Project (VII) - User Registration - Rob Ashton presses on with his RavenDB Image Gallery sample project, this time focusing on User Registration features, sharing the implementation of the business entities, services and integration tests.
• Creating WIX Installer for ASP.NET Web Application - Petr Pechovic walks through the theory and process of building an installer for ASP.NET Web applications using the WIX installer in this Code Project article.
• Integrating Prism v4 Region Navigation with Silverlight Frame Navigation - Karl Shifflett shares a sample application demonstrating the use of Prism V4 Region Navigation, and combining it with the the Silverlight 4 Frame Navigation showing how the two APIs can be combined.
• Windows Phone 7 - Top 10 Tips for a Successful Marketplace Certification - ‘jodonnell’ shares a list of 10 key points to ensure you consider before submitting your applications to the marketplace for testing to help ensure that your application will pass the tests.
• NHibernate 3 and Autofac, can go together? (part 1) - Context is King - Thang Chung explores using NHibernate 3 and the AutoFac IOC implementation together, and will be giving some background on each technology and showing some implementation. This first part looks at NHibernate 3.

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It’s a Brew Anniversary today - 700 editions old today, and a useful time to remind you all that if you have had articles featured in The Morning Brew, or you are a reader of The Morning Brew you can get a badge to display on your blog or website asserting that fact - full instructions are in Edition 500.

Software

• Introducing "Vingy" Add-in for VS2010 - Search StackOverflow, CodeProject, DotNetKick etc easily from with in Visual Studio - Anoop Madhusudanan shares a Visual Studio 2010 Extension which brings search for a variety of Developer sites (Stack Overflow, Codeplex, CodeProject, etc) along with the general web search into the IDE

Information

• jQuery Templates, Data Link, and Globalization Accepted as Official jQuery Plugins - Scott Guthrie proudly announces that the first three jQuery Plugins developed by Microsoft as a part of their partnership with the jQuery Project have now been officially accepted into the library. Scott gives a brief outline of the three plugins (jQuery Templates, jQuery Data Link, and jQuery Globalisation) along with links to the now official jQuery documentation.
• Javascript Libraries and ASP.NET: A Guide to jQuery, AJAX and Microsoft - Dave Ward blogs on the MIX Online site about the new jQuery Plugins from Microsoft, along with looking at what the shift to jQuery has meant for the ASP.NET Ajax, Microsoft Ajax Library, ASP.NET Ajax Library and Ajax Control Toolkit projects giving a review of the origins and evolution of these projects
• Developer Review - Four ASP.NET MVC View Engines - Jason Haley gives a detailed Developer Review of 4 of the most popular / common ASP.NET MVC View Engines, examining the WebFormsViewEngine, Spark, NHaml and Razor engines, looking at the features they offer compared to each other, and looks at them in use, giving a good basis to help you decide which to use for your projects.
• Working with RavenDB Documents + Entities - The Debate - Rob Ashton takes a post aside from his RavenDB series to discuss the variety of possible solutions for working with Documents and Entities using RavenDB, looking at 4 approaches storing entiy data in the document store, looking at the pros and cons of each.
• Defense in Depth: A Developer’s Perspective - Nick Harrison talks about the importance of having some level of depth in your security practices, talking about the importance of not just the network security infrastructure, but how developers should also put multiple layers of security into the code.
• No backtracking, Part One - Eric Lippert talks about backtracking algorithms, and goes on to discuss how the C# compiler does no back tracking across the different phases of compilation, meaning each phase has to give a concrete solution, and examines this in the context of the lexing of expressions.
• There’s no substitute for customer feedback! [Improving Windows Phone 7 application performance now a bit easier with LowProfileImageLoader and DeferredLoadListBox updates] - David Anson shares updates to the LowProfileImageLoader and DeferredLoadListBoc Windows 7 UI Classes which help improve the performance of Windows Phone 7 Applications. This update addresses a number of customer reported issues and suggestions.
• Silverlight Sessions Coming to DevConnections Las Vegas November 1-4 - Dan Wahlin talks about some of the sessions he is going to be delivering at DevConnections, and gives a nice introduction to the MVVM (Model Viiew ViewModel) pattern in this blog post to set the scene for his more advanced session at the conference.

Community

• The European NHDay will be streamed online - Great news for anyone who was unable to attend the first NHibernate Conference, being held in Bologna this Saturday (9th October), they will be streaming the talks from both tracks live on UStream, with recordings to be made available for on-demand viewing after the event.
• Want a Windows Phone 7? Here’s your chance! - Pete Brown highlights the full day MSDN Simulcast of the Windows Phone 7 launch event on Tuesday 12th October, 5 hours of streamed content live from the event covering a range of topics from the basics of building applications for the Phone, design guidelines, games development with XNA, to the market place and the cloud.

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Software

• Extension Analyzer V3 - Mynor Ivan Muralles announces the release of Extension Analyzer V3 on the Visual Studio Blog. This extension provides exploration and diagnostic information for other extensions (covering VSIX, PkgDef, VS Packages and MEF components), allowing you to trouble shoot problems with extension loading
• Introducing: Emaroo 1.0 - Roland Weigelt releases the first version of his Recently Used Files browser which gives a quick and easy way of opening recently used documents across a range of applications including Visual Studio, Blend and Office.

Information

• 31 Days of Windows Phone | Day #1: Project Template - Jeff Blankenburg kicks off a month long series of posts on developing for Windows Phone 7 promising a post a day throughout October. This first post dives straight in and starts exploring the key parts of the project templates for Windows Phone 7 development
• The curious case of the publicity-seeking interface and the shy abstract class - Jon Skeet explores some of the complexities of using Interfaces when you have internal types, and looks at alternatives using abstract classes to solve the problem, illustrated with an example from his NodaTime project.
• Technical Debt Is Like Your Friend, The Mafia Bookie - Derick Bailey shares an amusing piece comparing techincal debt incurred during a push to delivery to a mafia bookie. I’m sure anyone who has experienced technical debt firsthand will recognise the link here.
• MSDN Magazine: October 2010 Issue - The October edition of MSDN Magazine is now available in online format. This month’s topics include ThreadPools, Bing Maps, .NET Micro Framework, Interop with the Enterprise Distributed Cache, Windows Phone 7 Development and AppFabric Serivce Bus Discovery, along with a range of topics covered in the regular columns.
• The Null Object pattern and the Maybe monad - Derek Fowler talks about the Maybe monad and shares a comparable implementation using the Null Object pattern, sharing his code examples.
• RavenDB - Image Gallery Project (V) - The Structure &
  (VI) - Entities, Repositories and Commands - Rob Ashton continues his series looking at a real application implementation using the RavenDB Document database, looking at the structure of the application, the views and entities, unit of work and the implementation of the documents for storage, along with the repository and commands for accessing the documents
• NHibernate - Customize the Linq provider to call your user defined SQL functions - Giorgetti Alessandro looks at using a custom dialect in NHibernate, along with custom implementation of the HQL generation to give the Linq implementation the ability to call custom functions in the database.
• Interested in PEX & MOLES? Wish you could go to a five hour workshop on them? Here’s the next best thing… - Greg Duncan highlights the recordings of the PEX and Moels Workshop event held in Madrid back in July. This recording offers 5 hours of content on the features and applications of PEX and Moles in testing.
• Public static fields gone from F# 2.0 - Ian Voyce discusses the decision to remove support for Public Static Fields in F# 2.0, discussing why they were removed, and looking at alternatives for when you need to use something like them.
• Ten caching mistakes that break your app - Omar Al Zabir takes a look at 10 of the common problems / mistakes that can creep into your application when you cache objects, discussing some of the more obvious ones, and some where your application performance may actually degrade once caching is enabled rather than improve.
• The easy way to create an Entity Framework "Defining Query" - David Ebbo shares an example of the Defining Query support in Entity Framework which allows you to define a client side database view which you can use in your code as though it was a database view, showing how to create one manually as the designer does not offer tooling for this feature.

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET - The Brighton Alt.Net Community are meeting for beers tomorrow (Tuesday 5th October) at their usual venue, The Skiff. Th event is informal and follows the usual turn up, suggest topics, vote on them and then discuss the most interesting ones pattern
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus @ E-VAN 29 September 2010 - The European Virtual Alt.Net group have now posted the recording of Andreas Öhlund’s session on NServiceBus, in which he covered the message sending aspects of the service bus recorded at last Wednesday’s live meeting event
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Glenn Block on "Embracing HTTP in the .NET platform" on 18 October 2010 - The European Virtual Alt.Net Group have their next event planned for the 18th October 2010, and will feature Glen Block talking on REST, and the improvements coming in WCF for working with REST and HTTP
• NxtGenUG Event: C# Abuse with Jon Skeet - The Manchester chapter of the NxtGen User Group welcome Jon Skeet delivering a session on abusing the C# compiler creating code which causes the compiler (or your code reviewer) pain. The event is being held on Wednesday 20th October 2010 in Daresbury.
• Event: SQL Server User Goup meeting in Edinburgh - Scottish Developers highlight a SQL Server User group event being held in Edinburgh this Thursday (7th October) at Microsoft’s offices. The event features Tony Rogerson and Allan Michell looking at implementing Hierarchies in relational data and exploring StreamInsight.
• SQLBits videos (distinctly amateur) - Jamie Thomson shares a collection of behind the scenes interviews from this weekend’s SQLBits 7 event held in York giving a taste of what the event is all about. I had a great time at the event, and if you deal with SQL Server and you’ve never attended you really should.
• WIN a FREE Phone with like NO effort and attend the Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch - Scott Hanselman has brokered a deal where (US Only unfortunately) you can win a Windows Phone 7 device in return for a small amount of promotion of the Windows Phone 7 Launch events

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Looking forward to the SqlBits Saturday community event in York this weekend, always good to learn a bit more about SQL Server and to catch up with old acquaintances. If you see me there, come and say hello.

Software

• AntiXSS 4.0 Released - The Microsoft Security Tools blog highlights the release of the AntiXSS 4.0 library. This is the binary release, the source code will be published on Codeplex next week. This release targets .NET 3.5, and helps you as a developer deal with correct encoding of values to ensure user provided values do not get executed at cause a security vulnerability.
• ASP.NET Security Fix Now on Windows Update - Scott Guthrie discusses the release of the ASP.NET Padding Oracle fix on to Windows Update, and provides some answers to some further Frequently Asked Questions about the deployment and implications of the patch.
• Neovolve.Toolkit 1.0 RTW - Rory Primrose announces the stable 1.0 release of his Neovolve Toolkit, and this release includes a number of features for Windows Workflow 4, along with additions and helpers for working with various areas of the .NET Framework including threading, reflection, communication, and the Unity container.

Information

• A DSL For Handling Zero, One, Many - Derick Bailey looks at applying the functioanl programming concepts he’s been exploring recently, an takes a look at creating a monad like DSL to refactor some code into using.
• The Truth About Value Types - Eric Lippert sets about debunking some of the myths about Value Types, and their place on the stack, giving a more correct restating of the statement ‘Value types go on the stack’, and discussing the storage of data values by the CLR
• RavenDB - Image Gallery Project (IV) -Tracking Documents - Rob Ashton continues his series on building a sample application using the RavenDB Document database, giving a recap on the basic interactions with the data store, showing the code for CRUD type operations.
• Smart Dispatcher - Getting Back to the UI Thread - John Papa shares a simple implementation of a dispatcher class to allow your background work threads in Silverlight get back to the UI thread to update the UI.
• Heartbeat: a progress monitor for long-running processes - Elton Stoneman looks at implementing a simple heartbeat signalling mechanism for use within long running transactions, sharing his resultant implementation.
• Custom Windows Workflow activity for dependency resolution - Wrap up - Rory Primrose wraps up his series of posts looking at implementing Dependency injection / resolution in Windows Workflow based code, and shares the activity which provides the DI capabilities as a part of his Neovolve Toolkit.
• The Immediate Window: Running WinDbg and SOS (Son of Strike) Commands - Zain Naboulsi looks at using the SOS debugger extension from within the Visual Studio Immediate window, showing how to load, configure and execute the SOS commands from within the IDE
• Implementing Reliable Inter-Role Communication Using Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus, Observer Pattern & Parallel LINQ - Valery Mizonov looks at the implementation of loosely couple communications between different role instances within Windows Azure using the AppFabric Service Bus, the Observer Pattern and the Parallel Linq extensions. Full source for the solution is available

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